Sucker Punch: “We’re a One-Team Studio”

February 4, 2014
Written by Jason Dunning

While we still don’t have any real clues about what Sucker Punch is hiring for, Sucker Punch Founder and inFamous: Second Son Producer Brian Fleming gave out some interesting information to Edge about the company, where he explained to them that they are a one-team studio:

Our studio really prizes focus. We’re a one-team studio; we’ve always been that. Anything that steals focus from that is something that we’re trying to eliminate, whether that’s starting a second team to work on another game, or working on another platform simultaneously. All of those things compete for our focus, so we’re very driven by the ability to isolate anything that’s a distraction from what we’re trying to do.

Basically, this means Sucker Punch isn’t following Naughty Dog’s lead of having two teams within the same studio working on two different games (in Naughty Dog’s case, The Last of Us and Uncharted PS4), and it looks like their unannounced project will really start development once inFamous: Second Son is wrapped up.

Speaking of Second Son, Sucker Punch has completely rewritten the enemy AI after inFamous 2, with Fleming explaining:

It was an enormous undertaking and made the first year of the project kind of a pain in the ass, because the enemies were behaving very badly. But we’re finally over that hump and now we’re spending time polishing and improving those encounters and giving enemies more specific things to do. We spent a lot of time watching people playing the game, learning how the AI can be improved. It’s not one quantum improvement, it’s [lots of] little improvements, and they all add up to the combat being a marked improvement over our previous games.

Would you ever want to see Sucker Punch splitting into two teams so they could work on the inFamous franchise and a new IP at the same time? Let us know in the comments below.